Book review: ‘Red Moon,’ by Benjamin Percy

In Benjamin Percy’s 2010 novel The Wilding, protagonist Justin Caves wonders whether humans are just “complicated animals, not so different from a deer or a wolf, knitted together with the same sinew but in another design.”

As if in response, a neighboring Iraq War vet sews together the hides of small animals into a full-body fur-suit and skulks around suburbia, in effect laying some of the groundwork for Percy’s follow-up, Red Moon, in which werewolves live among us and the line between human and animal is hazier still.

Red Moon will draw comparisons to Justin Cronin’s The Passage, another “literary horror” novel. The results are about the same. Like The Passage, Red Moon is an overly busy, bloated narrative, lacking horror but showcasing the writer’s finely tuned literary skills — skills which in this case only get in the book’s way. Alas, Red Moon is too much literary, not enough horror.

Unlike Cronin’s, Percy’s novel is heavy on political allegory, an alternate history in which lycans are stand-ins for various forms of The Other, including Muslims, African-Americans and Jews. But rather than developing this imagined history, Percy hopes the blatancy of the metaphor will be enough. It isn’t.

Early on we learn that U.S. military forces are occupying the Lupine Republic, the lycans’ European homeland (liberals claim it’s because we just want their oil, er, uranium). “The IEDs — and the ambushes, the firefights — had increased lately,” Percy writes. “The lycans … wanted the American forces to leave; they wanted their country back.” A country which, Percy tells us, “was established in 1948 after nearly two thousand years of dispersal.” Hmm.

Outside the Republic, lobos-infected lycans live among us. “Like AIDS,” lobos is a virus that “must be blood-borne or sexually transmitted.” In the United States, lycans are required to carry special identification and must prove they are taking regular doses of Lupex, a drug which makes them less subject to “transformation.” Even though the lycans won some fierce civil rights battles in the 1960s, they’re still looked upon by many as secondary citizens, including Oregon’s George W. Bush-like governor, Chase Williams, who wins a presidential campaign by exploiting the people’s freshly heightened fears of lycans. It’s all heightened because a group of lycan radicals has begun staging terrorist attacks around the country.

One victim of the ensuing anti-lycan backlash is Claire Forrester, a teenager living a sheltered life in the Wisconsin woods. She wants only to escape to college and have a more exciting life. Instead, excitement comes to her when government agents storm her house and kill her parents, sending Claire fleeing west.

In Oregon, where she meets Patrick Gamble, the “Miracle Boy” lone survivor of a lycan attack. These two main protagonists become Percy’s star-crossed lovers, attempting to reconcile their attraction with the fact that one is human, one half-animal. Their storyline is the novel’s high point and contains Percy’s most expressive, artful writing.

If only there were more of it. Unfortunately, two-thirds of the way in, the narrative takes a sudden turn for the post-apocalyptic. The final 50 pages are a mess of serendipity and coincidence, so much so that at times Percy seems to be at a loss, writing things like “Somehow Patrick finds her.” Percy’s page count (530) comes close to matching Cronin’s (784), but there’s an odd disconnect: The first nine-tenths of Red Moon drags and the conclusion is too rushed.

If I haven’t gotten to the horror yet, there’s good reason: Percy never gets to it either. In Red Moon, blood squelches, blood slushes, blood drips from nearly every page — but the book lacks any real suspense or scares.

Percy is a sharp, gifted author whose work is fastidious to the point of excess. Even his sacrificial three-pages-and-dead characters are given intricate back stories — a stylist’s choice that won’t appeal to most horror fans, who would much rather experience the fright than be fed minute details about the frightened.

David Duhr is books and fiction editor at the Texas Observer and runs WriteByNight writers’ service in Austin.

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